In 2008, a Chinese restaurant displayed a bilingual sign above its storefront to accommodate English-speaking patrons. To save a few pennies in creating the sign, someone working for the restaurant skipped use of a professional human translation. Instead, the restaurateur typed the restaurant name into a machine translation program, which quickly returned some English text that was printed and placed above the business storefront without review. Unfortunately, the translation utility was not working that day. Because of the misfortune, Internet users worldwide have seen photos of the restaurant sign displaying the supposed English translation, Translate server error.
Public interest in machine translation is growing as the nature of business becomes increasingly international, translation technology continues to improve and Google makes news each time it adds machine translation features to another of its online applications. With increased interest comes increased optimism. However, it is important to question whether this optimism is based on reality or hype.
Consumers' optimism about machine translation often cools when they notice glaring errors in machine-translated communications. Some of these anecdotes are rather humorous, like the incident involving the Chinese restaurant sign....
Read the rest of the article, "Machine translation brings blunders, successes in international business" and the archives for the International Business column on DeseretNews.com.
1 comments:
This is why we really need professionals in business signage. We all know that there is no perfect translator yet. They should have checked the signage first before they used it. How can an Englishman know that he can eat in a Chinese restaurant with a name like "Translation server error"?
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